The long awaited Facebook iPad app is finally here. On Monday, after months of delays, speculations, and a leak, the social media giant officially launched its first tablet app.
The main features of the app are:
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Facebook at your Fingertips: To scroll through your News Feed, you can use your fingertips. To flick through the albums you can swipe the page and to zoom in on any particular photo pinch on it.
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Bigger and better pictures: Pictures on the iPad are at their best. You can view the photos as an album or as a slideshow, whatever your preference is.
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Speedy Navigation: A slick navigation menu on the left side of the screen allows you to quickly move to features like News Feed, Messages, Groups and other places you commonly access on the social network.
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Chat, games, and other features: You can chat with your friends from the iPad and play games in full-screen mode. You can also watch high-resolution videos and record High Definition video.
Another new important feature of this official iPad Facebook app is that it brings app discovery to mobile devices. To illustrate: If you now browse your News Feed from the desktop, you will notice that your friends occasionally post updates using various apps and games. If you click on one of these links, you will be directed to the app in question. This is a way in which apps can spread virally across Facebook. The other way is through requests, which allows users to invite their friends to certain apps or games.
Earlier these features were not available on the mobile version of Facebook, but with this app, this feature is receiving a deeper integration.
For example, while browsing through Facebook from the iPad app you saw a friend of yours has posted a Words With Friends story in your News Feed. If you clicked on the link and had the native iPad version of Words installed, then Facebook would switch you over to the game. If the app is not already installed, it will link you to the App store, from where you can download it. And in case, a native app is not available at all, then you would be directed to the HTML 5 version.
Facebook is doing its best to guide you to the version of the app that will work best on whatever device you are accessing it from. If you are browsing Facebook from m.facebook.com, you will be directed to mobile web versions of apps, if you are browsing from iOS, you will get the App store versions and when Facebook is done with the revamped version of the Android app, you will be directed to the Android Market version of apps.
This means a lot for app developers since it means that mobile apps can tap easily into Facebook’s viral channels.
An iPad version of the Facebook app has been expected since the original Apple iPad was released in April 2010. Recently, there was a rumor that Facebook would launch its official iPad app and its mobile apps platform at the Apple’s iPhone 5 event last week. Steve Job’s sad demise, caused a delay, yet again.
Facebook is the most popular app on most of the mobile platforms and since, the official version of the iPad app was not available till now, many third-party Facebook iPad apps became very popular. The blame, however, lies with Facebook and not Apple. While Microsoft develops the Facebook app for Windows Phone, RIM develops the Facebook app for the BlackBerry OS and HP develops the app for webOS, for iOS and Android, the social media giant itself develops the dedicated app.
In fact, RIM released the first dedicated tablet app for the social network. And, apparently, it was not due to technical reasons that Facebook delayed the release of the app. Reportedly, the app was ready in May, but Facebook did not release it and the Facebook developer who built the app quit because he was unhappy with the delay in release.
You can download the app right here.